The attack in Paris was an attack on freedom and Liberty. The cowards who committed these heinous acts should be exposed for what they are and condemned by all people, everywhere. The right to freedom of expression preserves our liberty. John Milton in 1644 said, Give me the Liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. John Stuart Mill in 1859 argued in On Liberty, that without freedom and free expression, there can be no progress made, that arguments need to pushed to their logical limits to advance thinking... Such being the reasons which make it imperative that human beings should be free to form opinions, and to express their opinions without reserve; and such the baneful consequences to the intellectual, and through that to the moral nature of man, unless this liberty is either conceded, or asserted in spite of prohibition. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was approved by the National Assembly of France, on August 26, 1789 and was written by the Marquis de Lafayette declared that freedom of speech was a natural, unalienable and sacred right of man. In Article 11 it states, The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, Our Liberty depends on the freedom of press, and that cannot be limited without it being lost. The reason our founding fathers included the right to a free press inout constitution was because they knew the communication of ideas and information, the right to inform and be informed, the dissemination of ideas and the expression of opinion are all necessary components in a political system based on self-governance and individual liberty. This idea of a universal freedom of speech has been around for over 4 centuries. It was even acknowledged as a human right in 1948 in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stating that, everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The US Supreme Court, in 1988 in the Hustler Magazine vs Falwell case, even affirmed the right of parody to public figures regardless of the how crude or boorish the portrayal because the contributions of free expression to the public interest outweighed those of prurient interest. Judge William Rehnquist wrote for the majority, At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern. The freedom to speak ones mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty -- and thus a good unto itself -- but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole. We have therefore been particularly vigilant to ensure that individual expressions of ideas remain free from governmentally imposed sanctions. The First Amendment recognizes no such thing as a false idea. As Justice Holmes wrote, When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market . . . . We have now seen that despite the vociferous assertions from the Obama Administration that the War on Terror is over, clearly, by the events which unfolded yesterday, that is not the truth. It is a naive belief that disengagement from the world will make America safer. Our policy of Leading from Behind has left a vacuum of power that has been quickly filled with chaos and malefaction. Now, imagine a world that did not have the freedom, or the journalists, the editorial cartoonists, and a free and unrestrained press to point that out. As the light of liberty is dimmed so are the prospects of a peaceful and safer world. As Ive said before, the tragedy in Paris demonstrates the need to shine the light of exposure on those who subvert religion to justify brutal acts of barbarity. Only when the world can truly see these animals for what they truly are will the world unite against these emissaries of death and destruction. It is needed now more than ever. In defense of liberty: investors/editorial-cartoons/michael-ramirez/733685-the-pen
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 20:34:05 +0000
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